David Antin
David Antin (born February 1, 1932) is an American poet and art critic.David Antin, Poets.org, Academy of American Poets. Web, Aug. 23, 2015. Life Born in New York City, Antin earned his M.A. from New York University in 1966. In the late 1960s, Antin began performing extemporaneously, improvising "talk poems" at readings and exhibitions. In the late 1960s Antin moved with his wife, writer and performance artist Eleanor Antin, to Southern California to take up a post at the University of California, San Diego, in the newly formed and experimental Visual Arts Department. He served for a time as gallery director and much longer as a professor there. In the early 1970s, his influence on a nascent group of conceptual photographers among the graduate students there was powerful. He has a fellowship in the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEH. He also received the PEN Los Angeles Award for Poetry in 1984. Antin lives in San Diego with his wife. Writing Antin has said that as a child he wanted to invent things, and that to him this meant he must either become a scientist or an artist. His early published poetry, collected in "Selected Poems, 1963-1973," was experimental, using found or "readymade" texts to address issues of language. In "Definitions for Mendy," a poem from this book, he uses definitions of "loss" from both a dictionary and an insurance handbook to fuel a meditation on the death of a friend. In his "Novel Poems" from the same book, he pages through popular novels, choosing a line or a phrase from each page to assemble poems. After gathering some experience reading his poems, he began to find the convention of reading his own previously-written poetry stulifying. He turned instead to improvising poems that are a kind of thinking out loud about the act of creating meaning. The themes of these "talk-pieces" are often inspired by their location and audience. The talk pieces can be viewed alternately as poetry that seeks to re-connect with oral and performative aspects of the poetic tradition, as philosophy in the tradition of Plato's dialogues or Wittgenstein's lectures, or as a "site-specific" artwork like Robert Smithson's earthworks. He tape-records each performance and often composes subsequent written versions, which are collected in books like "talking at the boundaries," "tuning" and "what it means to be avant garde." In his talk pieces Antin blends personal narrative with philosophical reflection to address issues of meaning. In "tuning," for example, he critiques the concept of "understanding" and offers an alternative model. In "what it means to be avant garde" he suggests that the avant garde attempts to address not the future but the present. In "the fringe" he tells a story about resistance to the Vietnam War that offers as a central figure a bucket containing the urine of several Guggenheim poets. Publications Poetry *''Definitions''. New York: Caterpillar Press, 1967. *''Code of Flag Behavior''. Los Angeles, Ca: Black Sparrow, 1968. *''Meditations''. Lost Angeles, CA: Black Sparrow, 1971. *''Talking''. Kulchur Foundation, 1972. *''Talking at the Boundaries''. New York: New Directions, New York, 1976. *''Tuning''. New York: New Directions, 1984. *''Selected Poems, 1963-1973''. Los Angeles, CA: Sun & Moon, 1991. *''What it Means to Be Avant-Garde''. New York: New Directions, 1993. *''i never knew what time it was''. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005. *''john cage uncaged is still cagey''. Singing Horse Press, 2006. Novel *''After the War: A long novel with few words''. Black Sparrow Press, 1973. Non-fiction *''Autobiography''. Something Else Press, 1967. *(With Charles Bernstein) A Conversation with David Antin. New York: Granary Books, 2001. *''Radical Coherency: Selected essays on art and literature, 1966-2005''. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Translated *Bernard Pullman, Modern Theory of Molecular Structure. 3rd edition, Dover, 1962. *Heinrich Dorrie, One Hundred Great Problems of Elementary Mathematics: Their History and Solution. Dover, 1965. *Werner A. Gunther, Physics of Modern Electronics. revised edition, Dover, 1966. Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.David Antin b. 1932, Poetry Foundation. Web, Apr. 19, 2014. See also *List of U.S. poets References External links ;Poems *David Antin profile & 4 poems at the Academy of American Poets * David Antin b. 1932 at the Poetry Foundation. *David Antin at UbuWeb Includes PDF edition of Autobiography and full text of In Place of a Lecture: Three Musics for Two Voices from Talking ;Audio/video *David Antin at Electronic Poetry Center Includes excerpts from books, interviews, and sound recordings *David Antin at YouTube ;Books *David Antin at Amazon.com ;About *David Antin at Design Observer A short piece on the history of Antin's some/thing journal (coedited with Jerome Rothenberg) and its BOMB HANOI cover, produced by Andy Warhol *from "An Interview with David Anton, Spring 2013" at Poems and Poetics ;Etc. *David Antin Papers, 1954-2006. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California. The David Antin papers include diaries, extensive correspondence, published and unpublished manuscripts, working notes, and over 300 audiotapes and videos of lectures and performances. Category:1932 births Category:Living people Category:American poets Category:University of California, San Diego faculty Category:New York University alumni Category:20th-century poets Category:21st-century poets Category:English-language poets Category:Poets